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Dana Milbank Knows Nothing About the Founding Fathers

Reading a liberal like Dana Milbank requires a strong constitution and a strong stomach. And speaking of constitution, the U.S. Constitution is something Milbank knows very little about, as is on display here in a piece titled “A strange way to honor the founding fathers.”

He gets it wrong right off the bat:

Republicans gained control of the House last month on a promise to “restore the Constitution.” So it is no small irony that one of their first orders of business is an attempt to rewrite the Constitution.

Apparently Milbank doesn’t know that there is such a thing as Article V, providing the methods by which the Constitution can be amended. Milbank goes on:

On Tuesday, Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah), a member of the House GOP’s majority transition committee, introduced a constitutional amendment that would allow a group of states to nullify federal laws with which they disagree.

But it isn’t just this amendment; apparently, Bishop is going to introduce other amendments to address the overreach of the federal government. Milbank decides to get snotty:

Several amendments? Would it be easier if they just got some red pens and walked over to the National Archives to do the job?

To justify his outrageous outrage, Milbank throws in the straw man [emphasis mine]:

“This repeal amendment gives states a weapon, a tool, an arrow in their quiver,” he told a group of state legislators assembled at the Hyatt in downtown Washington. Of course, states have fired similar arrows before, and it led to a Civil War and Jim Crow – but Bishop wasn’t going to get into that.

Actually, it was statist Democrats like Milbank who “fired similar arrows before” that led to the Civil War and Jim Crow – but Milbank wasn’t going to get into that.

See, Milbank has it all wrong (I know; I state the obvious). It’s statists like him who have edited the Constitution without going through the mechanics to amend the Constitution as outlined in Article V. Well, “edited” isn’t the right word; “violated” is much more accurate. That’s how we get such liberal unconstitutional rulings and laws like Jim Crow, Plessy v. Ferguson, Wickard, Raich, Roe v. Wade, Hamdan, Boumediene, Kelo, the GM and Chrysler bailouts, Lisa Jackson’s EPA, TARP, Obamacare, affirmative action; the list is endless. What Bishop is doing is an attempt to strenghthen the Constitution by keeping the federal government from ignoring it, which the federal government has been doing for decades when its expedient. Milbank doesn’t actually want to debate Bishop’s actions, so he throws in the specter of racism to keep from having to debate those actions.